Perhaps we could accept these costs in exchange for some gain, but I don’t see what collective gain there is from strategic voting.
Vote total from strategic voting can better reflect a post or comment’s quality as opposed to its quality*readership (number of people who read a post/comment), which is what you would get if people did non-strategic voting. With the latter, it’s hard to tell whether a post’s vote total is high because people think it’s very high quality, or if it’s just moderately high quality but read (and hence voted on) by a lot of people.
I’ve changed my mind—I think strategic voting might send more information than karma-blind voting. It counteracts visibility spirals as you describe. There might also be another effect: consider a community of identical, deterministic, karma-blind voters. Disregarding visibility spirals, everything gets sorted into five categories (corresponding to the number of ways for a single user to vote). In reality, deterministic and karma-blind voters aren’t identical, so karma still varies smoothly. But is “people are different” the only way information should be sent? Doesn’t a group of identical voters hold more than a quint of useful information? This is why I have a vague suspicion that strategic voters can send more information—they send more information in a degenerate case.
Vote total from strategic voting can better reflect a post or comment’s quality as opposed to its quality*readership (number of people who read a post/comment), which is what you would get if people did non-strategic voting. With the latter, it’s hard to tell whether a post’s vote total is high because people think it’s very high quality, or if it’s just moderately high quality but read (and hence voted on) by a lot of people.
I’ve changed my mind—I think strategic voting might send more information than karma-blind voting. It counteracts visibility spirals as you describe. There might also be another effect: consider a community of identical, deterministic, karma-blind voters. Disregarding visibility spirals, everything gets sorted into five categories (corresponding to the number of ways for a single user to vote). In reality, deterministic and karma-blind voters aren’t identical, so karma still varies smoothly. But is “people are different” the only way information should be sent? Doesn’t a group of identical voters hold more than a quint of useful information? This is why I have a vague suspicion that strategic voters can send more information—they send more information in a degenerate case.